Vocabulary Activities

Have you run out of ways to teach vocabulary in fun and engaging ways? The following activities will help you in your goals to help students build vocabulary. These vocabulary building activities are sure to get your students to expand their vocabulary.

Morning Greetings

Hello Isn't this a glorious day?Good morning my most (adj.) class.I love your cheerful attitudes this morning.Welcome to school on this magnificent morning.I'm pleased to be inside our warm classroom. Outside it is just frigid.

We would all love to have our kids have a rich vocabulary. A quick way that I love to use is to use different greetings each morning. Its a really simple way to show students that there is more than one way to say something. I provided a list of some of my favorites. Feel free to add one of your own by leaving a comment.

Set some time in the morning for students to greet each other. You might notice that students start to use some of the new vocabulary that you've used in your greetings. This practice allows students to not just be passive recipients of language but lets them practice new words. It also lets them develop good social habits.

Use Foldables

Having kids use foldables is a great way for students to remember new information. It helps engage students in their learning, provide kinesthetic feedback for students, and helps students learn to take notes. I got the idea for this vocabulary foldable from A teacher's treasure blog. I put my own twist on the idea and have created a printable that you can use for the foldable.

Vocabulary Foldable

To make the foldable cut out the pieces on the Vocabulary Foldable printable and then use the above picture as a model when putting the foldable together.

Your words, my story

This is an activity based on a vocabulary strategy developed by Magaret Richek called Semantic Impressions. I changed the name of the strategy so its more kid friendly and created a handout. In this activity a teacher picks vocabulary words from a story that is going to be read. The teacher then makes a list of the words in the order that they are presented in the story. Before the story is actually read students compose their own stories using the words. When writing the stories students must:

Introduce words in order, they cannot use a word in the list until the previous one has been used.

Once a word has been introduced it can be used again.

Various forms of the word can be used, for example (frightened, frightening, frightful)

The story needs to make sense with a beginning, middle, and end.This activity allows students to become familiar with vocabulary words before they read them in a story. In Bloom's Taxonomy language this takes vocabulary introduction from being at the knowledge or comprehension level to the synthesis level. This will allow students to learn new words on a much deeper level.

One word - multiple meanings

Vocabmark

This is an idea by Brown, Phillips, and Stephens (1993), in which, students have bookmark that they can write down unfamiliar words that they come across. This is a great way for students to monitor their own understanding of what they are reading. This activity also allows students to make their own vocabulary word lists so the words that they are learning are individualized.

On the front of the bookmark students will write the title of the book they are reading along with the author of the book. On the back students will write new words that they come across. It is suggested that you can laminate the bookmarks to use them repeatedly but I prefer for students to use a new bookmark for each book that they read. This way students have a record of all that they have read. If you have students keep a vocabulary journal you can have them transfer the words they collect on their vocabmarks to their journals.

Word Storm

In this vocabulary graphic organizer, students will start by putting their vocabulary word in the cloud on the right. They will write synonyms of their word in the raindrops. The definition goes on the lighting bolt and antonyms go under the umbrella. Hope everyone enjoys this freebie!

Affix Trees

This is a great idea that I found on the Dandelions and Dragonflies blog. She has a template for the trunk that you can download and use. The idea is pretty simple, each trunk has either a root, suffix, or prefix on it and the leaves are all the words that you can make with those roots/affixes.

Virtual Field Trips

Field trips are great ways to expand students background knowledge around a topic as well as their vocabulary but we don't always have enough time or resources to get students out of the classroom.

The great news is that with just a computer, a connection to the internet, and a projector you can take your students on virtual field trips.

Steps

Identify what you want the topic of the field trip to be about.

Select material to use, (videos, images, websites, books)

Compose a list of vocabulary words that you want your kids to learn.

Finally you need to decide on a method for students to demonstrate their learning. Are you going to have them fill in a KWL chart of what they've learned? Maybe you could have them design a poster about their field trip complete with labels. Whatever you decide make sure that the activity puts some emphasis on the vocabulary that they will be learning.

Now that you've got your materials and assessment planned out decide how you will introduce the vocabulary and you got yourself a virtual field trip.

I find the following lists of sights to be of great help when planning a virtual field trip.

Images:

Flickr This is where I always start my search for images to use. When using an image have a class discussion on what students see. As that list what they see in the picture you can label the different parts of the picture. This gives students who didn't know the word before have an instant visual link to the word that they are learning.

Videos

There are many great places where you can get videos for your virtual vocabulary field trips. I like using YouTube but there are many school districts that prohibit the use of this site in school. So I like to download the video beforehand so I don't actually have to go to the YouTube site at school. When using a video why not see it at least a first without the sound on. This way you can focus kids attention on what they are seeing and get them to describe the video.

If you have checked it out yet there is a great new site that would be a great tool to planning a virtual field trip called MentorMob. I would highly recommend that you try it out. The site is still new so there are that many of what they call Playlists. (A collection of websites around a topic that you view in a certain order) I am linking to one about the causes of World War II so you can get an overview of what the site is like. Main Causes of World War II - MentorMob

Word Investigation - Morpheme Analysis

$2.00

Word Investigation - Morpheme Analysis

I've just finished a new e-book called Word Investigation. This book is full of graphic organizers that you can use to analysis morphemes in words. Doing this activity will help your students to recognize patterns in words, which in turn will help them to build their vocabularies, become better spellers and decode big words.

These graphic organizers are based on the idea of Morphemic Triangles by Rod Winters. To learn more about them I suggest you read the article he wrote for the Reading Teacher.Winters, R.. (2009). Interactive Frames for Vocabulary Growth and Word Consciousness. The Reading Teacher, 62(8), 685-690.

Vocabulary Graphic Organizers

Vocabulary Journal Templates

$2.00

Vocabulary Journal Templates

Having students keep vocabulary journals is a great way for students to organize, learn, and review vocabulary words. The templates that I've created let students record there understanding of the word, mark their favorite words, define the vocabulary term in their own words, draw a picture, find synonyms and antonyms and finally write a sentence for the word.

There are also specific subject area templates in this download. In total there are 16 different templates for you to print out.

Ice cream cone synonyms

Here is a fun activity to get students to stop using boring words and expand their vocabulary. This synonym activity has students write a "boring word" onto an ice cream cone and then synonyms are written on the ice cream scoops.

Why not have each student be responsible for a different word and then put them on a wall for a great wall display.

Below is a template for the ice cream cones. Just print them on colored paper or have your students color them.